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Bold But Red-Faced

Or soon will be.

I willfully give Mizzou’s Concerned Student 1950 for 2015’s truly most embarrassing moment. Not for what she did necessarily, just the way she did it

Child, I don’t know you, your pedigree, your hometown, if you loathe Lima beans. I don’t know If you have the gift of gastric onomatopoeia (within a burp, you can taste the way lunch smelled). But I know this much—that televised account of your anti-media rant during the racial protests on campus will come back to haunt you. Not necessarily professionally. I’m talking personally. Don’t get me wrong–taking a stand is always good. Just be careful that the foot your standing on doesn’t end up in your mouth.

You’re young and impressionable. Everything takes on a different hue when you’re out from under your old man’s roof and wrapping your head around all these new concepts like religion and waging war against what was instilled versus the expansiveness found in of the parentheses freedom of young adultery.

I know, I know. It’s adulthood. Hat tip to the late Kermit Schaffer

But my little miss blonde Idealist, this is a stage in life, and your right on target, It usually occurring in your collegiate years. If you’re 28, 30 and out marginalizing the marginalized du jour just for a photo op, then you’re just as dazed and confused as Woodersoon, alright, alright, alright.

Twenty-25 years from now, you’ll be dropping off little Pottsdamn or Shagella at soccer practice and/or for a probation hearing and you’ll think of the ass-hattery you participated in on that college campus that you once thought was so hip, proud and socially astute. Years later it becomes cringeworthy. You shudder as an expletive tumbles audibly from your lips. You shake your head. And guess what? You’ll only realize you have dandruff.

My, My, my. I know you’ll one day look back on this and almost be grateful in a skewed way that the horrible terror attacks in Paris took away all media attention.

You see, I’m entering the very early stages of the autumn of my life. I can see age 60 on the horizon. I’m learning that you make this trek towards maturity, while shaking off a lot of things you once thought were were so principled. A protest here, saving a whale there. But there’s also the seedy underbelly of young adulthood, that comes after all the social consciousness. Your social unconsciousness. Like getting shift faced drunk at Tracy’s wedding and incoherently insisting on explaining to her 83-year-old Jewish grandmother what a choad penis is……on video; like talking to that creepy older guy with the weird pants with three–count’em—three front pockets. One might have been an odd pouch of some sort. It was with this man with four cornered hair that you shared a pina colada on that cold, rainy Tuesday at Trader Vic’s…..his hair was perfect. Running out of the house half clothed after creating a fart infused shit splatter art stain on a “friend’s” bed linens minutes after having biblical knowledge of each other….THEN seeing him at a job interview two days later; how you’ll forever rue the first day you tried to be so cool at B’s lake house in 1979 when everyone laughed when you snorted your first line—-of artificial sweetener.

These are, you understand, just oddly specific incidents made up for entertainment purposes. Not memories or experiences culled from real life, least of all mine.